Monthly Archive: January 2021

31
Jan
2021

REDUCING

Quiet day, quiet weekend, quiet week ahead. Not in the mood for people, for conversation, for music, for sound. Two quiet days and a walk in the sunshine and snow. Rereading, recharging, relaxing. That’s all that’s needed right now, maybe that’s all that’s ever needed.

28
Jan
2021

HERE I AM

Got my stimulus check today, the second one, plus the printed copies of my 2020 blog books. A good mail day, for sure. The volume of my 2020 blog book is VERY slim. one of the slimmest, but the last four years have all been slim, so. It makes me wonder what the heck I wrote so much about in earlier years. I suspect some years just made fatter books because there were lots of photos included in them. Now that the kids are gone, I’m not taking very many photos, and when I do, I tend to put them...

25
Jan
2021

UP AND THEN WAY DOWN

Last week started on such a high, with the anticipation of the inauguration coming like a rainbow of angel choirs singing and the sun coming up. It’s been SUCH a freaking relief to look FORWARD to reading the news, checking the headlines, skimming social media. I heart everything! I care! I thumbs you up! And I cannot overstate what a relief it has been to have the former 45 silenced and to have silence not only from him but about him. He can’t disappear fast enough, as far as I’m concerned. Anders and I watched the inauguration, and I got...

18
Jan
2021

TOP OF MIND

It’s pretty amazing what our brains can do. I’ve been thinking a lot about memory lately. I’ve read a lot about the brain, but I don’t really know all that much, technically speaking. I am just really glad that it can keep so much straight! So many important details that we have constant and instant access to: personal info, contact info, memories. Just the fact that we have so much information on tap inside our heads at all times, without even the help of Google, is mind-blowing (ha!). On top of the important things we need to remember and keep...

16
Jan
2021

HOMEFULNESS

One full week of work down and we’re on to week 3 of the new year. Which feels the same as the old year, still. My mom is out of her house, and now officially “homeless”. She and my sister stayed last night at the condo she’s been offered temporarily by a friend, but are leaving tomorrow for my sister’s home in North Carolina for about 3 weeks. I’ve had text conversations with my sister, but haven’t really talked to either of them, other than to update them on what’s going on with Anders’ mom, since they had so much...

12
Jan
2021

ONE DAY AT A TIME

Two days of work and my shoulders are killing me. Oy vey. Karin has promised to give me a massage tomorrow. She’s very good at it but she doesn’t do it long enough to stick. This week has been insane and it’s only Tuesday, god help me. HOLP! My mom and sister are in frazzled crazy mode, trying to get everything done before the Friday hand-the-keys-over deadline and I think their crazy has rubbed off on me, all the way from Michigan. We had a bad scare yesterday with Anders’ mom. The nurse called Anders’ sister mid-morning, who called him,...

07
Jan
2021

AS THE YEARS GO BY, THEY TAKE THEIR TOLL ON YOU*

It’s been snowing all day, that thin corn snow that doesn’t stick. I didn’t actually check the temperature but it had to have been right at freezing, because even though it was cold enough to snow, it all just melted as soon as it touched down. Now, however, in the early evening, it’s STILL snowing and now, finally, there is a thin blanket of white. We’ve only had one other night of snow (maybe two? I can’t remember) but it’s always been gone by midday the day after. I hope it will stick around a little and brighten things up....

06
Jan
2021

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN

Karin was just over 3 years old when we moved into this house. As I’ve mentioned before, we had the house built to “painting-ready” and once we got the keys, Anders did everything else in the house: flooring, painting, trims, wallpapering, tiling,…everything. With two little kids under 5, we had our hands full, and some parts of the house weren’t done when we moved in (the important parts were) so there was a lot of box shuffling and moving things around. We had a lot of fun choosing the decor for the kids’ department which consisted of their two bedrooms...

03
Jan
2021

GET GOING

Karin is moving into a new place today, and it feels a little more permanent than the other apartments she’s had. She and her girlfriend Nelly, and Anders moved all her furniture from the apartment she had been sharing in Malmö for a couple of months, this morning and then this afternoon, she and I took another carload of stuff. For a 21-year-old, she sure had a lot of baggage already! It’s the second floor apartment in a quite big standalone building that has 3 other flats in it. It used to be part of an area that contained a...